Immanuel Kant is a philosopher who is easily parodied as the one who thought people should tell the truth in all circumstances, no matter what, because only in that way would a person be treating himself and those he was talking to as full human beings. You should even reveal the whereabouts of a friend to the murderer who comes to your door asking where your friend is. Kant had obviously never heard of the Gestapo.
Not so fast. Kant's depiction of moral life makes sense if we compare his description of true lies—lies that are truly lies—with something else that is closely akin to true lies: white lies, the kinds of things people do all the time and which are regarded as necessary evasions that help move life along without doing great damage to our stature as moral beings. Consider the following examples of white lies that are drawn not from fiction but from social transactions in which I was myself involved.
I met a girl, when I was a lot younger, who I dated a few times. I asked her out again and she said she had to visit her grandmother that weekend. I ran into her on the street on that Saturday and she said, with a bit of embarrassment, that the weekend visit had been called off. I said fine and I called her the following week and she went out with me and I eventually married her, and so we were until she died some five years ago. I surmised, at the time, that she had been putting me off with the grandmother story because she was not at all sure that she wanted to make going out with me a habit. She had probably figured out that I had figured that out and that even if I hadn’t, it didn’t make that much of a difference. We were both cooperating in the idea that her excuse was a valid one so that we could both keep our options open: to possibly continue dating. The excuse worked to that end even if it wasn’t true. That is different from a male friend who, at about that time, called me on a white lie I told about where I had been on a particular weekend. We continued our walk in silence, both of us hurt, and I was certain that this friendship would not last. It didn’t.
A good many white lies work in just that way, as excuses for behavior so that people can maintain otherwise good relations. An employer tells a boss that he can’t make a meeting because of a doctor’s appointment. Most white collar and professional employers will not ask for a doctor’s note. There is no negotiated number of sick days to respect. Rather, the fact that an excuse has been offered means that note had been taken that there had to be something mildly extraordinary about the circumstances that required putting off some of one’s responsibilities until a later date, and that the employee will find a way to make up the work that had been missed. Any excuse would have done, and it doesn’t much matter that the excuse was made up. A person who is always making excuses, of course, is an unreliable employee, whether the excuses are true or not.
College students do not always know this because they have been trained in high school to come up with doctor’s notes and other “excused” absences as a way of getting out of responsibilities. Students would come to me when I was teaching and get flustered if I said I didn’t want to see notes from the infirmary. They would also get flustered when they asked if it were alright to go off to a conference rather than attend a class, and I said it was their choice. They were adults, I would explain, and had to make up their own minds about how to juggle their priorities, whether or not they could miss my stuff and still do well on my final exam. Excuses do not get you out of responsibilities; they just postpone them. As I said to my colleagues when engaged in the endless conversation about the relation of professors to their students, I was not a policeman and neither was I an accountant who kept track of how many grandmothers a particular student claimed had died.
If a white lie is a fabrication offered to ease social relations, then there are many other uses for it than that of providing excuses. Another type is the white lie that allows a person to maintain privacy. A man I knew said he had to leave meetings so that he could meet a friend on a street corner. He did this repeatedly and at the same time of the day. I assumed not that he wanted an excuse for getting out of a meeting he despised; I thought he was going off to meet his shrink. Otherwise he would have simply left the meeting without explanation, unless he was a timid person who always feels the need to make excuses, which he was not. People also offer white lies in the form of euphemisms, so as to spare them the need to disclose the seriousness of an illness. My mother insisted to my father that he was weak from diabetes rather than from terminal cancer. People say in divorce court, I suspect, that they had irreconcilable differences, or were the victims of mental cruelty, rather than that their irreconcilable differences were over sexual practices. You tell your boss that you were indisposed with a tummy ache rather than that you went for tests for a possibly fatal disease so as to safeguard your privacy, not because one excuse is any less valid than the other.
A third category of white lies allows people to avoid a truth much too hard to disclose. People not only allow children to believe in Santa Claus; they think it best to tell children that grandma went to a better place when she died. That brings the child some comfort. Religion, after all, is best appreciated by children. Most adults have to make excuses for it: that religion makes people morally better, or that it is a form of solace, or that it is an experience that transcendeth understanding, rather than that it is just the god-honest truth of the matter. When my son was a pre-teen, and had just learned about Hitler, he asked me whether, as Jews, we would have been spared the concentration camps because we were non-observant. It may be that it was cruel of me to give him the unvarnished truth and tell him “no”. There are just some things about which I cannot bring myself to tell lies.
When must we tell the truth? A true lie happens when the truth of a matter is significant, when there is no easily available external way to establish the truth, and when one has been asked in some serious way to be truthful. My son’s question met all of these criteria. It asked for my best judgment about the situation of people of Jewish extraction living under a government that was extremely hostile to Jews and he trusted me to give him a judgment when it would be some years before he could form his own judgment on the matter.
The Kantian mental experiment can be sorted out this way. Kant was a follower of Hobbes in that he also believed the creation of a government was a rational response, founded in individual self interest, to the problem of anarchy. Hobbes also said something outrageous when he said we only have the right to rebel against authority when we are in the shadow of the gallows. What he meant by that, which seems to make good sense, is that the state protects you until the very last minute in that there might be a last minute reprieve, and until then resistance to the state is likely to be foolhardy or symbolic, the weight of your interests shifting to rebellion only when the long shot of escape becomes smaller than the long shot that the state will spare you the gallows. This is not just moral advice; it is an accurate description of what happens under such circumstances. A prisoner in Auschwitz (an uncle of mine) decided to try to escape only when, as he put it, he could get a whiff of the gas emerging from the “showers” he was being herded towards. Then he made a break, expecting to be shot, and was lucky enough to get into a group being sent off for slave labor. When the count of the group was taken, someone else was shot.
Kant’s outrageous example also deals with extreme circumstances and is also an apt description of a choice people face. When people who declare themselves murderers or would be murderers knock at your door, then you are in a state of anarchy. You do not have enough information about the situation to do something other than speak the truth. No prudential argument offers itself. You can hope your friend heard people were out to get him and ran elsewhere. It may be likely that he had. Maybe the murderer already has killed your friend and is just testing you. You can worry about your own moral standing because there is nothing else for you to worry about. The man who was selected to be shot to even out the count of the work gang did not inform on my uncle. Why should he? It would have been useless. The guards did not care which one of their prisoners they killed. All the man could do, I surmise, was try to face his imminent death with a measure of equanimity.
If a Gestapo agent had come to the door, however, there would have been reason to lie. The Gestapo operated not in anarchy, where death is always a step away, but in something resembling a state. The Gestapo, however, had long broken their trust as legitimate interrogators, and so it makes sense to try to fool them, to throw them off the track. There may be a moral requirement that a person cooperate with one’s oppressors, so that slaves looked out for the well being of their owners, but there is no moral requirement that a person cooperate with people who are more than oppressors, who are instead simply tormentors who may torture you, though you may risk torture if you do not seem to be cooperating. So you can supply false information. In a situation where government officials do not, in any form or fashion, treat people as ends in themselves rather than as means to an end, there is some moral purpose in preserving in your self the ability to say “no” by lying.
Yes, it is worse to live under a government which makes it difficult to act in a conventionally moral way, where people keep their word and do not make mischief for the sake of instilling terror in a population. It would be nice if American slaves didn’t have to make themselves appear to be (or really become) lazy and uncomprehending so that they could more easily survive. Moreover, living in permanent opposition to a state or a society is morally enervating because it leads to paranoia. That is why one is obligated to tell the truth to, let us say, the New York City Police Department, which probably has good reason to be looking for your friend, and which is a legitimate arm of a legitimate government, and so duly entitled to make such inquiries. Neighborhoods dominated by drug dealers may not trust the cops, and neighborhoods where there is police brutality may not trust the cops and that creates a problem of establishing the legitimacy of the institution to ask questions with the expectation of getting true answers. Under such circumstances, it is the moral thing to treat your friend as the end in itself. Morality, even Kantian morality, is not a system that has to be oblivious to circumstances; it only has to weigh the options in moral terms.
People once in a while announce to people what my son had implicitly assumed: that a serious answer should be given to a serious question. I was on a plane trip home from an academic conference during the Vietnam War and was sitting next to William Rusher, then the publisher, if I remember correctly, of William Buckley’s “National Review”. I got him into a discussion of Vietnam and such issues as nuclear disarmament and must admit that he got much the better of it. As the plane prepared for its descent, he turned to me and asked if I would honestly answer a question that he knew I could evade until we landed. He wanted to know if I wanted to overthrow the government of the United States. I was flustered and also amused that anyone would think I might. So I gave him the canned and perfectly truthful answer that, like Winston Churchill, I thought democracy was the worst form of government except for all the others. As we got up to disembark he asked to shake my hand, which I thought then and think now an act of condescension--he shouldn’t have found it all that remarkable to run into a patriotic liberal--though I think his gesture was meant as a sign of respect for the loyal opposition. And so I shook his hand. Anyway, I hadn’t just appeared before a Congressional Committee, where I might have been rude enough to say that whatever I thought was none of their business.
The sense of lies offered here is quite different from that provided by Sissela Bok in her book “Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life “. Bok thinks that Kant is too rigid and that most white lies are pernicious. For example, doctors should not prescribe placebos to their patients. I think, on the other hand, that prescribing placebos is not such a bad idea if the art of medicine can’t do any better than that, as was the case until not too long ago with just about any malady. Leeches and potions might work, after all, and they gave the patient some calm because some procedure was being followed that might alleviate the condition. We focus on immediate tasks so that we don’t focus on the long term issues, like death, that are far more difficult to manage. Oncologists regularly advise people to engage in painful courses of chemotherapy which might or might not do much good but stand some chance of doing a good deal of good.
Arnold Schwarzenegger gave a different meaning to the idea of true lies than the one I offer--the conditions under which lies are truly lies--when he entitled one of his films “True Lies”. The film was about lies that people wished were true. Being a dull office worker was only the cover story for being a James Bond character, and the wife also wished that her husband lived a Walter Mitty fantasy life for real. She enters the fantasy, and becomes an exciting femme fatale herself, although required to do a strip tease for her husband, which is supposed to serve as her initiation rite into the world of spies. The film makes the striptease embarrassing rather than humorous, and so leaves the film’s audience with the same feeling of distaste, perhaps for the whole world of spying, that is achieved by the scene on which it is based, in Shakespeare’s “All’s Well that Ends Well”, where a wife believes she has to be unfaithful, though her seducer turns out to be her husband. The line between truth and dreams is most disquieting. Fiction allows that, whereas, in my view, social life has enough trouble getting people to attend to the truth of what they say and do that it makes sense to use oaths and other devices, such as a baleful stare, to get people to tell the truth.
Witnesses at a trial, of course, take an oath to tell the truth. That is because the facts they claim to have observed are in fact germane and not easily undercut, and the oath is a way of saying to them that this is not the time for white lies. I thought the same thing was true at the time of the Vietnam War, when young people told me they would take their chances with the draft because they might get assigned to go to Germany, and if not, then they might desert. I said that taking your oath as a soldier bound you to go wherever they sent you. The way to remain clean was not to take the oath at all.
And so we get to present day political matters. FDR was criticized, in the light of the decision to go to war in Iraq, for having also played fast and loose with the truth to get his way. That is just not true. Yes, he didn’t go into the details of the naval engagements in the Atlantic just before Pearl Harbor, but he did let the American people in on the fact that we were providing escorts for British ships. The substance of what he said was true. That is not the case with Iraq. Bush did not just mislead; he did not just tell white lies. It is fair to say that he lied to the American people, including me, when he claimed that it was certain that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, when the best that could be said was that one could draw a reasonable inference that such was the case, and that the case for weapons of mass destruction was of no great account because it wasn’t the real reason for going into Iraq anyway. When a President addresses the American people, it doesn’t matter whether he is under oath. He breaks his trust with them when he lies to them because what he says is significant, is offered as a formal statement, and is not easily subject to public scrutiny. You have to trust him, and if you can’t do that any longer, you are best rid of him.
The American people, however, are more forgiving of political lies than I am. It was easy enough for them and for me to forgive Bill Clinton his lies. Ken Starr decided to force Clinton to either tell the truth about an extramarital affair, which is usually the province of white lies, however lacerating that may be to a marriage, or else to lie under oath, and Clinton chose the gentlemanly course, though perhaps not the honorable one. The American people, however, chose to forgive Bush his lie rather than to kick him out on his ear when they had the chance in the 2004 election, perhaps thinking that diplomatic talk and foreign policy arguments are always shadings of the truth rather than what a nation stands behind. So much the worse for the cause of truth in government.
Now we are faced in the White House with a man who lies all the time, not for reasons of statecraft but, as best I can figure out, because it is the way he tries to gain some control over the world he inhabits. Bush had lied about one big thing because it was important to him and his top officials to get to do what they wanted. Trump, on the other hand, lies about everything: whether Obama had been born in Kenya, the size of his inaugural crowd, whether cases of coronavirus are going up or down. And the American people don’t know what to do with that because in most circumstances people prefer not to lie if they can help it, neither to tell either white or true lies. Commentators don’t know what to do with this. They get angry because catching him in a lie makes no difference; he just goes on doing it. Supporters have accepted this. Don’t judge him by what he says but by the policies they agree with that he supports, such as getting border security or appointing conservative federal judges. The larger question is whether you want to support a President or even a candidate or even a friend who cannot help but lie. Doesn’t that make you complicit, or at least live, for the duration of his Presidency, in the state of Kantian moral anarchy that results from the absence of the distinctions between white lies, true lies, and the god honest truth?